YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Nolan

lines on the record: 81
first: 2026-04-14
most recent: 2026-04-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Allied partners that we can sell into. And so there's this known good market. And so you work through questions like that when being challenged on what if nuclear doesn't grow? And it's like, well, worst case, there's an existing market. We can start a business there and time is then on our side for when and if nuclear grows, which we think it will grow very rapidly. We're in a good position. And a lot of these conversations that I had with Peter were 2023 before the AI data center boom. And so now it's extremely obvious why we're going to do this.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All the abstract layers of meta level questions of just even going back to the fact of like we haven't had any new nuclear in a long time why is that is nuclear just regulated to death is the regulation actually a thing that's meant to stop it basically make it illegal so all these questions of like why is it really the case that we're going to get more nuclear now and i think it was that challenging this that force us ask a lot of hard questions that we feel great about our answers to like even the one you asked of are you dependent on every smr succeeding to make a real market on the halu side yes the halu production ultimately will be smrs that create that demand but to make halu you have to make leu and leu is what goes into the grid today are technology works on leu also and we'll be building leu capacity and so there's this two billion plus us market and a similar size market in our”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe the recent example that's completely linked to this conversation is the transition from Founders Fund to General Matter. And you have to say, okay, well, what was this thread that led me here? It goes all the way back to like being recruited into Founders Fund by Peter and then support through a decade of investing. And then as I wanted to go shift focus to this, total support for doing that. Obviously, Peter tried to beat up the idea and make sure it's good. being along for that journey and then ultimately joining our board as one of very few board cities on. Really appreciate that.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some people are just wired a certain way, like even in the investing role, I would take 10 meetings a day, like to the point of definitely diminishing returns, but want to work hard and make sure you see everything. The other thing about investing when properly understood is that you actually don't need to invest in that many companies. And while you can brute force it and boil the ocean and try and meet everyone and try and be extremely helpful to everybody, all that ultimately matters is a few companies per vintage. And you just have to be into those. Certainly as a VC, much more than even private equity or hedge funds. As a VC, you don't actually have to work that hard meeting everybody. You can dive in as much as you want into specific companies and value add and help them and be their preferred investor. But it is not a job of labor. It's really a job of ideas and thinking. The quality of life of being surrounded by smart people, talking through ideas and thinking.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like what we're doing a lot, but in terms of quality of life, sound is good. I think any entrepreneur would tell you that the quality of life is not as good. Once you start a company, you're taking the harness and you're latching on whatever it is. You have to go do it. It's not optional. If you're an investor and deal comes across your plate, but I'm a little bit too busy, I've got enough over here I got to work on. It is easy to let that one go and not have to do that work. I think when you're running a company, there's stuff that comes up that you just have to deal with and you have to take care of it or it's going to be a problem. Now that's also a function of the time horizons of each job. So I think when you're operating, you can see the feedback cycle very quickly. As an investor, that company that you might have just chosen to not meet with to preserve quality of life, that could be the next great company.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wrong to not go do that. And so it's almost like there's a desire to not start companies full stop and then only with extreme exceptions will we start on it. I think if it's an extreme exception, it makes sense that it doesn't happen that often. Now, why don't most people do that? I think the investing life is probably far better than the operator life.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All it case by case, even for Founders Fund. It's not a programmatic thing that Founders Fund has tried to do. It's almost the opposite. Founders Fund recruits for people that want to be investors, that don't want to be entrepreneurs. If they want to be entrepreneurs, they should go be entrepreneurs. And the two roles are extremely different. People that have done both realize how different operating is than investing. And so Founders Fund explicitly selects for people that want to be investors. And yet once in a while, a company will start just because it almost feels like a disservice to Acho started. So in this case, decade plus of investing. Not all of the reactor companies, they all say the same problem. No one's doing it. And then you look at the final thing of like, okay, important problem, no one's doing it. Maybe I can do it. And you look at what it takes to actually go do that and you realize, wait, my background is really aligned with that. If I don't do this, then if the goal is to have an impact on the world and we can have positive impact through investing, but a much greater impact through starting this specific company, then it's actually.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Uncertain the costs are often above what's projected. And when you look at the total package, it's not cheaper than coal. It's not cheaper than natural gas. It's not cheaper than hydro. So why do we want this? And I think if you told someone, okay, nuclear is safe. We can dig into that. Understood you're not interested if it's more expensive. Why would you be? But what if it's cheaper? What if your utility bill got cut in half? I think people would suddenly find that extremely compelling for something that could be tens of miles away from their house and still power in the grid.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Car crashes, all these things. You can think of it in terms of catastrophic events like that. You can think of it in terms of your health and what are we chronically doing that's unhealthy, that's taking its toll versus acute things that take their toll. I think people have a strong bias towards that, but often it's the right thing is to look at the data. I don't think most people find that compelling. I think the more compelling thing in nuclear for me is think of a world in which we are not constrained by energy and we won't be constrained because we can all agree that it's good because it's baseload, it's very affordable, it's going to bring down your rates. It's safe and it's clean. And we can debate those and we can look at the data, but let's imagine that future world in which we have all those things. I think the way to make nuclear really compelling to people is actually to check the final box, which is cost. Again, going back to why have we not had more nuclear, the schedule to bring it online for the large gigawatt scale projects has been”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pointing out kind of the difference between acute and chronic sort of events. And I think acute events that are very attention worthy, people remember those and the things that are just low level in the background people don't think about even more.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Percent of our grid. And this is going to mean a lot of late nights, weekends, just working as hard as we possibly can. And is that something that they've done before? Is that something they like doing? Do they know what they're signing up for? Are they really motivated by this? Those are things I'll typically screen for subject to everything else being already verified. And so a lot of my day right now is trying to make sure we have the right early people on the team to build the right culture for them to then go recruit and hire the next people. And so it's the saying, yeah, it's not just the team you builds the company build, but the early team you build is the company you build. And that's the modified Naval quote. And so right now so much of the time is spent on recruiting, interviewing, filtering, which is actually what drives a lot of my external facing stuff is we got to get the word out to the right people so they know what we're working on. They know why this is important, why this is the bottleneck to scaling nuclear and to scaling energy in the country.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Changes over time. So my strong preference is internal facing. And so to really be there helping to do the work internally, right now we're in a phase of company building and team building. And so we're rapidly hiring. So a lot of my days right now is interviewing people. I'm the last step in the interview. And what I'm screening for is does this person not just have the skills, which have already been screened for at that point, but do they have the attitude of they care about this problem? They know that there's lots of places that they could work, but this may be the only place that they can work on this problem in a private company. And they know that there's probably places that they could potentially go make more salary that they could have an easier job, a more predictable schedule. But we're trying to do this mission that requires us to go as quickly as possible and to deliver before end of decade for both the advanced reactor industry and the existing reactors on the grid, which is like”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“EPC firm as a team to go run your construction project. Not just engineering, not just manufacturing, but actually construction of millions of square feet on schedule, on budget. And so the whole DNA of the company is oriented around drive to deliver for the industry as quickly as we can while being safe, reliable, every other dimension you would want, subject to those constraints, go quickly because the industry needs it. Don't have analysis paralysis. Don't deliberate over things that don't matter. Let's get a service live that can deliver for the US industry and then let's bring the cost down over time. And so everything's oriented around schedule and cost.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you look at where they are in the country and they're just scattered everywhere. There's no one place to go. And so we had to go the other option. You go to where all the other engineers are specifically hardware, aerospace, and that's Southern California. The team DNA that we wanted to set up was this is an engineering-driven company. We're not doing a science project. No new physics. No going down a multi-year R&D path that's uncertain. We need to get this operational as fast as possible. This is an engineering problem. Everything we have to do has to be thought of as engineering. We're engineering cost out of the system. We're engineering performance up. We're engineering costs of capital down. We're engineering scheduled to be as tight as possible. We're even engineering our own buildings. This is taken from this Tesla playbook. Don't hire a GC and outsource everything. You lose total control. The schedule could be, it's not in your hands anymore. You need to build your own in-house, engineer, procure, construct.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Comes back to the team. I think Naval has said this a bunch of times. The team you builds, the company you build. And so to us, it's team DNA. We want people, we thought about where do we put the company. This was a big question at the very beginning. And you look at who you actually need on the team. And of course, you need nuclear engineers, but you also need great mechanical engineers, electrical, software, chemical, every type of engineering. And so you ask yourself, well, where do we want to put the company? And it turns out the percent of the team that's nuclear engineers is single digits. We're not doing a reactor. There's actually no nuclear reactions in our process. We need to make sure that there's no nuclear reactions. But to do that, you don't need a huge number of nuclear engineers. And so there was this question of, do you go to where the nuclear engineers are, or do you go to where all those other types of engineers are? And on dimension one, that nuclear engineers, you don't need that many of. You need great ones, though, where are we going to find them?”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to put it in investment terms and like business strategy terms, that would be it. But I think if you go back to the very beginning, it just turned out that this was the thing that was most necessary. This step of enrichment was why we didn't have the more enriched fuel that advanced reactors needed. And you realize the U.S. had lost the ability, despite being the number one in the world during the 80s by far. It was something we were extremely good at. We completely stopped doing it. This bottleneck was going to be the bottleneck to all of nuclear energy if you believed in advanced nuclear energy. This is the thing we had to solve. So we did it because no one was doing it and it was extremely important and urgent. And I think that ended up corresponding to this very good entry point for the market. But I think the two are really linked. I don't think it was coincidence that if you're solving a problem that's urgent, that no one else is doing on a small but emerging market, it will completely fit that framework”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Requires more input material to refine it all the way there as you filter through more and more and more material. That fuel can be more than half of their energy production cost. And so to them, it does matter a lot. And the way that fuel has been purchased in the industry so far, which maps directly onto our North Star metric, is five different services. A utility purchases uranium, and then it purchases upgrades to the uranium as it goes through the supply chain. So it's really a tolling business where you buy, they own license to the material and it's book transfers all the way through and they are paying different people per unit of service provided to do their work. The service that they provide to us is priced in dollars per sweet. And if you look at the actual cost structure of producing fuel all the way through for low enriched, maybe enrichments, a little bit less than a third, but it's one of the largest cost segments for halu, it's even more. And we think it's going to be the dominant.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is. The importance depends on what type of reactor you're running. So if you're doing a gigawatt scale classic AP1000 light water reactor that uses 3 to 5% enriched fuel, low enrich uranium LEU, then the cost of that fuel is a percent of your overall cost is quite low. It doesn't really matter. What you want is availability. You want reliability. You want diversity of suppliers. You want to know that they're going to be there. And you don't want them overly concentrating and creating supply risk for you. But the cost of the fuel is not a huge input into your cost of electricity, your LCOE. Most of that's going to be CapEx for your huge $10 billion project. So for them, it doesn't matter that much, but for advanced reactors, it matters a lot. So some advanced reactors, the cost of the fuel, the Halu fuel that goes into it enriched further to $19.75, which requires”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so they had cost per kilo to orbit really to a specific orbit of low Earth orbit. And you can actually decompose the orbital piece into a velocity. So it's almost like cost per kilo to some velocity. Our version is cost per kilo of uranium, that of a payload, to some enrichment level. And so it's like cost per kilogram, two, three to five percent or to 19%, which can be described as cost per separative work unit or separative work unit is the industry measure of enrichment where it's basically kilos times some entropy reduction or separation or organization of the material and so a separative working unit is typically referred to as kg swu kilos times separative working units our north star metric is dollars per kilo swu”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believes that the demand is there. They've been through nuclear renaissances before that didn't pan out. And I think their point of view would be. At least that's been the attitude of many people that we've talked to. On the ease of doing this, it's the proven thing. People have done this before, but it's still not easy. I'd say you see some of these retro technologies that were done in the past, and then we lost a lot of the capability because we didn't do it for so long. And so for enrichment, it's been an industry without a lot of change since really the 90s, not a lot of progress, not a lot of leveraging of new technology. There's a lot of doing the hard engineering work to get back up to speed to modern. And then even once that's done, you're building facilities that are a million square feet and large, large multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects in the same way that like maybe building the first Tesla roadster was hard, but the real challenge was how do you scale this up? I think it's extremely underappreciated how much goes into standing up a huge industrial facility. And I think that's actually the hard part.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say it's so easy at all. And I think the latent demand has not been obvious for a long time until the last couple years. So any large latent demand, I think, is in the last 24 months linked to the thought that there's going to be a lot more data centers doing AI inference or training jobs. But if you go before that, there wasn't a lot of new nuclear being talked about. There was need for Halu, but that's a pretty small market. And so I think a lot of people have thought that this is not really something where we need new capacity. If you go back to the 2010s, really no new capacity building anywhere in the 2010s. Certainly not for LEU production, certainly not for Halu, just because it's been emerging so recently. So I think the fact that this is a growing market is we're still betting on that in many ways. It's not the case that we're currently deploying tons of new reactors in the US, but we think that's coming. So I think the market, we believe in deeply. I don't know that the entire industry.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, plenty. I think we've got certainly hundreds of years of supply in the ground. U.S. has supply. We have active mining in the U.S. Canada has even more supply, higher grade ores, enough to supply us for a very long time. Same as Australia. And then Kazakhstan's a huge deposit and U.S. imports from there as well. So on the ore side, not an issue. That'll progress. That'll get more efficient. There's new techniques there. So mining's going to make progress. I think the cost of mining will come down. output will go up, but it's not really an issue.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's U238, there's U235 as it comes out of the ground. There's other isotopes also. But the main ones, U238, and you basically want to filter that out to get U-235. U-235 is the isotope that wants to react. That's the fissile isotope.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advanced reactors to get them the fuel that they need. So ultimately, the product that we developed is enrichment. And you can apply it to either of those levels. To your question on how is that different from weapons grade, when you see countries going to weapons grade, they're often trying to go north of 20%, which is the internationally agreed limit to where you go to weapons grade. For nonproliferation reasons, there's strong interactional consensus that we should all just stay below 20. Really, the risk is not worth the reward to let people go higher. You see countries going to 60% saying that it's for their nuclear energy industry and it's pretty suspect. I think clearly they're just trying to get as close as they can to weapons grade, which is well overnight. And they're trying to develop weapons. And so ultimately, it's not different technology, but it's applied in a different way and in a completely non-international consensus.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Enrichment is for the most part the same if you think of it again as like a refining process or a distillation process you're just refining it further ultimately the product that we make is enrichment services you can run material through from natural uranium as it comes out of the ground and you can run it through an enrichment process to get to any arbitrary level of enrichment the commercially relevant ones are LEU 3 to 5 percent for existing reactors or halu 20 for advanced reactors And so when we set out to do this, we said, hey, Halu is what the market needs most right now. And we set out pre-Russia ban. So there was no LAU cliff. We said we're going to develop enrichment capability to serve that market. And the fundamental unit of enrichment capability is it's just the ability to do this refining. It's measured as something called separative work units in the enrichment field. We will provide that service and we will sell that service to utilities.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the small market. This is the emergent market that we can go after that we don't think any incumbent will go after on the same time frame as us. And we can serve those advanced reactor customers that we've known for years and make sure that they have the halo that they need to deploy and scale their reactors. That's where we're starting. And then phase two is go into LEU production, low enrich uranium for the 94 reactors on the grid today and supply them with a fuel that they need, which today in the US is a two and a half billion dollar market.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We will not be importing enriched uranium from Russia or uranium from Russia, which the only place we get it enriched is Europe and Russia. And today, Russia is about 25% of U.S. imports. And so 20, 25% immediately goes away in 2028. And so utilities in the US will then start eating into their inventories and trying to work out deals to import more from Europe. But Cliff want his Halu 20%. Cliff 2 is LEU low-enriched uranium at 3% to 5% enrichment. And then at some point in the future, the US stockpile of enriched uranium for propulsion for the Navy. And eventually that runs out. And so there's these cliffs. We're focused on the nuclear energy side of it. LEU and HALU, and that's what we're going to be producing. We realized, hey, the most urgent cliff that we need to address as soon as possible is HALU for advanced reactors. And coincidentally,”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Halu is the fuel that they need. Halu is uranium that's enriched to about 20% U235, which is the fissile material. They want it enriched a little bit higher to 20% because it helps the reactor be smaller. So that's the first cliff is Halu for advanced reactors. They have none. If there's no reliable supply in the next few years, it's going to make it very difficult for them to scale up. So far, they have small amounts from the DOE to prove that their reactors work the way they think they will and to do first deployments, but not to scale to where it really moves the needle on the grid. The second nuclear cliff, the nuclear fuel cliff, is 2028, when the US's ban on Russian uranium ports goes into full effect. January 1st, 2028, we are through an act of Congress no longer allowed to import Russian uranium.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so this goes all the way back to understanding the fuel cycle or the fuel supply chain for nuclear. So there's five steps. You mine uranium out of the ground, you then convert it into a gas. You then enrich it. You then deconvert it back into a solid. And the enrichment step is really refining step, a separation step. Then you turn it back into a solid, and then you form fuel pellets, five steps to go from ore in the ground into a little pellet into a fuel rod that goes into a reactor. The US has good capability across the board except in enrichment. It's the one area that we don't have any commercial scale capability. There's some R&D capability, but nothing that's commercial scale or commercially competitive with Russia and Europe. And so we decided let's hone in on the enrichment step. That's the bottleneck. That's the thing that's leading to these, what we call the nuclear fuel cliffs, where there's three cliffs, cliff one is the Halo supply chain. This is the same problem we heard from all the SMR companies. We don't have a source of”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Say number one is they don't have fuel to operate that's a showstopper so we're trying to eliminate that risk and then part two is they're too expensive I think the physics will work I don't think anyone's too worried about that you have dozens of incredible companies with great engineers who are trying to solve the advanced reactor problem and typically they'll pick a form factor that is of the right size to focus on a certain market whether that's microreactor for remote or SMRs for data centers or very large gigawatt scale for the grid and SMRs I think ultimately have the plan of being cheaper than the gigawatt scale construction projects for the grid but there's many reactors that are trying to solve the reactor's cost side of it and the question is going to be is there energy production cost low enough but for these advanced reactors it's not just a fuel availability problem in question it's a cost question it's the fuel can be half of their total cost and i think long term enrichment will be half of the fuel cost”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Greatest scale first, that is a very low cost compared to the advantage of deploying quickly in a community and being invited there versus being rebuffed. So I think total no-brainer and the modern data centers can do completely closed loop cooling so the water issue is not an issue. It's really just this power thing.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was just the concept of we're doing all this investment in the grid for the first time in decades, private companies are making the investment. They will make the investment with bringing their own power, bringing their own energy, BYOE. And they're going to be doing that investment anyway. Their biggest worry is probably something like, will I be allowed to build this data center in this community over the last year? I think that's been the start of a discussion. If they want to get to the right answer on that and they can tell a community, hey, we're going to be over here on this unused land. Are you okay with us being here and running a bunch of compute and being net positive to your grid? Can we just plug in and give you some extra power in return for inviting us to be a neighbor? To me, that's a complete no-brainer for everybody, that a slight cost increase during a time when hyperscalers, building data centers are all about speed to power and they want to be online as fast as possible because this is the contest. So who can get to the”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. So think of it as like the ultimate behind the meter thing is just an island. Imagine a fence around a few hundred acres. You've got a data center and you've got its nuclear power plant there or whatever other form that they might have, peaker plants, natural gas, turbines, maybe even solar in some cases. Okay, that's all cordoned off. It does not even touch the grid. It's not impacting the grid. It's not doing anything to the communities like rate cost completely separate. I actually think there's a huge opportunity to improve communities through this. If you have a data center putting billions into both the compute and the power production, let's say they're even 50-50 on power production and compute, can we increase that power production 10%, which is only a 5% project increase. And in the case of a gigawatt data center, bring an extra 100 megawatts to a community, that's huge. That would plummet utility prices for that community. So I think at a minimum, we're going to see people going behind the meter or now.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least for now, then that's a good format. On the other end of the spectrum, you have micro reactors, where you're saying there's a stranded community that's doing diesel generators. This is both bad for the environment and not that cheap. We can beat them on cost. And so you go micro reactor. I think one megawatt scale, not gigawatt megawatt. And then you have the middle, which is 100 to 300 total megawatts SMR, where SMR is small modular reactor. all three buckets have different approaches on the technology side, but I think all three are going to be important. And so if gigawatt scale is for the grid and megawatt scale is for remote communities or government installations, then the middle scale, I think, is going to find its niche behind the meter with data centers over the next five to 10 years.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That one piece at a time. So, on the reactor side, everyone thinks that the cooling towers, you have cooling towers and other industrial processes too, but everyone thinks of the cooling tower, which all it is is steam cooling off, hot water cooling off so that it can be reused as a coolant at the start of the cycle. So lots of industrial processes do that, but nuclear is known for it. That's typically about a gigawatt scale reactor, often in the US, an AP1000, Westinghouse gigawatt scale reactor design. which we can get into the technical of what type of coolant they use and what type of fuel which might be interesting but the thing to think about in my mind is that's a big reactor that's a good gigawatt scale i think the interesting buckets are around the size because they link to applications and markets and that's grid so you want to go battle it out on the grid you need gigawatt scale because it moves the needle on the grid and you're getting the scale that can bring your cost down as low as possible”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and pack it in so much smaller. I don't need as much material for my reactor. I'm not going to be going through as much mined product. It's just an order magnitude different. And so on first principles, nuclear should be an extremely affordable thing, potentially much more affordable than fossil fuels. Now, it has not been at all, but that's the goal. And so now you see this whole wave of advanced reactors trying to make that true. On the reactor side, and then we're trying to do it on the fuel side.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless you really care about safety, which is pretty acceptable from all forms, or you really care about carbon emissions, is it really worth it? Are you really going to do nuclear when it can take 10 years, 15 years to build a reactor? And they can be double the expected budget. That's really hard for a utility to stand up to and say, yeah, I want to do more of this. They need to bring costs down for ratepayers. They need to have predictability in when they're going to bring capacity online. On those dimensions, nuclear has not been the best. It's not highly responsive new energy generation and it hasn't been the lowest cost. So you say, okay, why care about nuclear? It's because on first principles it should be one the lowest cost. You've got much more powerful physics, much potentially smaller reactors outputting a lot of energy. You look at a pellet of nuclear fuel and the amount of coal that that's equivalent to is like a ton of coal. And so I can take all this stuff, all this space.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People think they question the safety side, it's the safest by far baseload, too. You have fossil fuel plant that has no impact on human well-being from emissions. And nuclear has none of the carbon emissions. And there have been high profile accidents with nuclear. You think of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, but the actual risk associated with nuclear despite those high profile incidents is still far, far lower than any other form of baseload energy. And so it's like, okay, if you ask me, what's the safest, cleanest form of baseload, nuclear, absolutely? Why do I believe in nuclear? I think those things are important. Okay, what about cost? How does it stack up on cost? And this is the piece where it gets really exciting to where over time we did less and less and less nuclear, probably starting in the 70s.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always on very reliable supply of electricity, not intermittent, but something you can actually design an industrial process around as the foundation of the economy. Even data centers want baseload. And so solar with enough storage could be baseload, but typically it's not anywhere near that amount of storage. Usually solar is more intermittent, more for peak shaving. So if you really want baseload, if you want something that businesses and industry can rely on, it has to be on almost all the time. You need it to be highly reliable. And so nuclear is the most reliable. So you check the base load box. People only in the last 10, 20 years have started caring about climate even remotely as much as they do now. And if you care about climate, I think maybe you care about carbon. You probably also care about particulate. Nuclear is the cleanest by far on these dimensions. So on the environmental side, nuclear winds for baseload. And then the safety side, this is the part that...”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look statistically, it's always been the safest, cleanest baseload. So I think for the economy, what you really want is baseload.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Massively undersupplied, can't get enough to build all the data centers. They're commanding very high great wages, can make more than people who went and got a master. Yeah, it's like an incredible career. And now get a lot of people shifting into it. I think labor responds. It probably takes a few years, but it's faster than building infrastructure. Infrastructure is probably the bottleneck. And then is it just energy? Probably not just energy, probably permitting”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the labor is actually the one that's probably the most responsive. If there's really compelling jobs in a field, people will shift over to that. The classic one the last couple years has been electricians.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“State's been fine until now, and then the direction is completely flat. So to me, the issue is that we have not increased at all in decades on the supply side. The direction, don't feel great. The state, I wish we had more. I wish we were not one-third of China. I think we could be doing a lot more things if energy was not just abundant but cheap. And so just making more high cost energy also won't bring back certain industries that won't cause us to start doing things we used to do.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wind in West Texas, stranded flare gas in South Dakota, North Dakota. And now those stranded assets are gone and now it's time to build new capacity and data centers are completely backed up on getting natural gas turbines and nuclear takes a few years to get installed. So I think just from an energy stability economic robustness point of view, you want to have capabilities and at least the ability to stand those out vision you need to.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Towards other things because while our energy costs are kind of high or our energy costs is higher than other countries because we're tighter on supply and they've overbuilt and they're subsidizing, but then they take those industries. And then they take the front of the supply chain and just start marching forward to where they can dictate a lot of different things about the economy. That was the classic view is economies are efficient, markets are efficient. If there's a demand for energy, we will bring it online when we need to. But physical world stuff has a timeline with it. And then in the US, it can be very hard to get stuff permitted to go do things. And so when there's unexpected demand that's very rapid in its increase, you might be caught completely off guard, which I think is the situation in the US now with data centers and them scrambling to find power and where a few years ago if you looked at a data center and you thought, okay, where are they going to place it? The answer was they'll put the data center where there's stranded power.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whole argument from the 90s almost till 2020 was something like, even if it would increase the economy, would you want to? So, okay, do I want to have dozens of aluminum smelting facilities in my country, or is that better done overseas and it's low margin and not interesting and not going to accelerate your economy? And why do you have people working in that when they can be in the services world and do more interesting things? Certainly that was an argument, but I think we're seeing it right now. What happens when you're not proactive about it, when you don't have the capability even of expanding rapidly and you don't want to be caught completely flat-footed when there's a large demand for energy production? And now here we have it with AI and data centers. And you look at some of these curves and looks like data centers could consume if they were allowed to the entire grid by 2030 at this growth rate. And so I think in theory, you would say energy production will come online as we need it. But then in practice, if you don't develop it, you may bias yourself.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Something if it wants to continue to be relevant economically. You need more energy production if you want to grow your economy. And I think just purely outsourcing stuff overseas just gives up capability, especially as it gets like new manufacturing techniques, how to scale manufacturing rapidly, all these things that are so important.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's two of my favorite charts around this topic. One is GDP per capita versus energy consumption per capita. The R score and it is certainly over 0.8. You cluster every country on earth. You apply GDP per capita. You plot energy consumption per capita. And there's a very obvious line through them. There's outliers, but it's so predictive. It is the thing. Energy use and production is the ultimate proxy for human prosperity, for economic activity, for all these things. This has been, I think, pretty well understood for a while, but completely under discussed. And then you look at the US, this is the other chart I always look at is we grew our grid for a long time and then starting around the 90s, essentially no growth until today. China was growing a long time, 2010. We were equal, neck and neck. I think this year they now will be triple S on total energy production. And so the US just needs to do”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manufacturing. That's just on the design side. If you're actually going to make the thing and you're trying to design for manufacturing, well, then maybe you want your manufacturing actually co-located with engineering. And so that's what all the great hardware companies are now doing is you at least have your first of a kind manufacturing co-located with engineering under the same roof. You basically talk it out of here's why this thing that you just designed is hard for me to make if you can make it this way. I don't need a six-axis CNC. I can use this with a laser cutter and make this part. We're going to get 10x throughput at 1 tenth the cost. And so I think you need to at a minimum put your first of a kind manufacturing co-located with engineering and then better yet small scale manufacturing, mid-scale manufacturing, maybe a large scale you can push it somewhere else and go to a lower cost center as opposed to like Southern California where so many of these companies are. I think it's mandatory. You've got to bring it all together.”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Typically, a fixed interface that's not going to move very quickly. And so you have to treat it as fixed. And so everyone's designing their individual piece against preconceived interface requirements. And you end up with a really calcified architecture of your system. This is just at the system design level. And you can't optimize across layers for the overall goal. Now, if you bring all that in-house and don't have a lot of subcontractors, you can actually, as an engineering team, optimize with every iteration, trade off interface requirements. Hey, this thing that you asked of me over in the electrical team, for me, the mechanical team is going to be really, really hard. Do you mind giving me a little bit of breathing room on that? I'm going to make it up somewhere else. And so you can have those conversations much more easily when two people are sitting side by side at a desk than when you have two separate companies across the country. And so at a minimum, I think you need to pull the engineering together and vertically integrate and just sign up for doing more of the engineering yourself and not outsource it. And then part two is”
2026-04-14 · Invest Like the Best · Scott Nolan - SpaceX, Founders Fund, and Rebuilding American Uranium Enrichment - [Invest Like the Best, EP.467] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source